State’s confirmed Covid-19 cases pass 50,000 after 7,681 new cases
(Mike Groll/Office of the Governor: Andrew Cuomo holds a manual bag valve that could be used if a ventilator is unavailable. Cuomo today said the state has bought 3,000 of the valves and has ordered 4,000 more. They require a person to manually pump them. The governor said he hopes they aren’t needed. “This looks easy. I guarantee if you do this for any length of time, you’ll see how difficult it winds up being. This is the alternative if you don’t have the ventilators,” Cuomo said at a press briefing in Albany.
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in New York has passed 50,000. The state added 7,681 new positive cases since Friday, bringing the total to 52,318. Four weeks ago, the state didn’t have any confirmed cases.
The 7,681 is the biggest increase one-day increase for the state.
Orleans didn’t have any new cases reported, but the state’s numbers show 32 more confirmed cases in neighboring Monroe, 99 more in Erie County and 10 more in Niagara County.
New York City accounted for 4,368 of the 7,681 new positives.
The governor shared some positive news in the fight against the virus. The number of ICU admissions on Friday was 172, down from 374 on Thursday.
But there was worse news with the number of deaths in the state from Covid-19, increasing from 519 to 728, with the 209 the biggest one-day toll from the virus.
“These are people who we lost because of this virus,” Cuomo said. “If they didn’t have this virus, they would be with us today.”
Cuomo urged people to not be complacent and continue to wash their hands frequently, practice social distancing in public and stay home as much as possible.
“It’s going to be a marathon, but we’re going to get through it and we will get through it, and we are going to be the better for it when we get through it,” Cuomo said. “We will have learned a lot. We will have changed. We will be different, but I believe net, we’ll be different in a positive way.”
